I’m getting email updates now from Bakotopia, and the format seemed oddly familiar to me.
Viz:
“We’re goin’ to Camp Crystal Lake!”
It’s The Bakotopia Newsletter!
Mwahahahahahahaaaa!!!!
(Oh shush, you knew it was a comin’!)
The rest of the post comes over in a long, vertical stream. Images
that you wouldn’t normally see in a shout-out news update from a
newspaper (such as the butts of topless women) are interspersed with all caps run-on sentences that are highlighted in yellow:
**BAKOTOPIA
IS FREE FOR YOU ALL THE TIME! HOP ON BOARD THE LOVE TRAIN! POST YOUR
STORIES, EVENTS, PICTURES, BLOGS, MUSIC, THEATER REVIEWS, CRAZINESS,
ANYTHING GOES ON BAKOTOPIA, WHERE YOUR WORDS ARE READ AND CHERISHED
LIKE A RARE BOTTLE OF FINE ITALIAN VINO, BABY!!
It took me a second to really engage the gears (hey, it’s Friday and I was thinking about where I want to bike to in Venice tomorrow), but then I realized that it’s what you see in the band shout-outs on MySpace or that come to you through email when you wind up on a up-and-coming (yeah, right) band’s email list.
I’m not sure what you’d call this school of webdesign. It’s certainly urgent and real and true to its roots. But I’d like to see what kind of response you get to this as opposed to a more polished email huckster traffic grabber – you know, like the one that the NY Times sends out to its subscribers listing the Top 10 stories of the past month. I find myself looking through the list, musing “Got that, got that, got that, need that, got that…”
To strain a metaphor – if what the NYT offers is an ala carte list of carefully prepared brainfood morsels, well then … the equivalent of the Bakotopia’s list would be the corn dogs, Slurpees and nachos from AM/PM. Or would they?
Since this is the way that the audience talks to itself – would it behoove newspapers and other content providers/aggregators to adopt this kind of a message format? I find it actually a little confusing – as my old graphic design teach said so many years ago – “All emphasis is no emphasis. Decide what’s most important and make that big. Let everything else take care of itself.”
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